Summer fiction: Heated emotions for the sunny days ahead

Fleishman Is in Trouble

by Taffy Brodesser-Akner (Random House, $27)

Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s remarkable debut novel has “the currency of a hot dating app and the wisdom of a Greek tragedy,” said Ron Charles in The Washington Post. The title character, Toby Fleishman, is a 41-year-old New York City doctor who is discovering a brave new world of easy sexual hookups now that he and his talent-agent wife, Rachel, are splitting and he’s meeting women through Tinder. At the same time, Toby is taking on all parenting duties, because self-involved Rachel has vanished. All this antic early drama proves “obscenely funny,” and yet beneath the story’s comic surface, “there’s something wonderfully contrary going on.” All along, we are getting Toby’s story from an old friend, Libby—a magazine writer who’s now a stay-at-home mom. And when Libby finally brings in Rachel’s point of view, the novel “turns the tables on Toby with wit, insight, and a bracing, simmering rage,” said Connie Ogle in the Minneapolis Star Tribune. Maybe, just maybe, this funny and savage book isn’t about Fleishman after all; maybe it’s about “the insane expectations” that burden all women.

Mrs. Everything

by Jennifer Weiner (Atria, $28)

Jennifer Weiner’s “big, cozy” 13th novel is also “her most ambitious book to date,” said Marion Winik in Newsday. The author of Good in Bed and other breezy best-sellers here delivers a decades-long tale of two very different sisters. We meet 6-year-old Jo and 4-year-old Bethie in 1951, as their family is moving from Detroit to a nearby suburb. Jo is boyish and athletic, putting her often at odds with her mother. Bethie is pretty and eager to please, which eventually makes her vulnerable to an uncle’s sexual predations. “A host of traumas” follow, and the life choices the sisters make cost them dearly, said Patty Rhule in USA Today. Jo, though she’s a lesbian, marries and raises a family, while Bethie becomes the rebel. Weiner makes both sisters relatable, but if you’re a woman of a certain age, their story “may make you uneasy, even angry.” Though Jo and Bethie make peace with their lives being what they were, “Weiner isn’t so sure.”

Searching for Sylvie Lee

by Jean Kwok (William Morrow, $27)

Jean Kwok’s missing-woman mystery “will scoop you up from page one and won’t let go,” said Allison McNearney in TheDailyBeast.com. When 32-year-old Sylvie Lee flies to the Netherlands and vanishes, her younger sister commences a search that unearths secrets Sylvie and her Chinese-immigrant mother have kept for years. “Come for the mystery surrounding Sylvie’s disappearance, stay for Kwok’s masterful exploration of the painful choices one family makes to survive,” because the secrets begin there. Sylvie spent four of her childhood years in the Netherlands while her parents stayed in Queens, N.Y.; they couldn’t afford to keep her. Racism has affected her, too, and though she’s become a gorgeous, talented woman, Sylvie sees herself as unlovable, said Carol Memmott in The Washington Post. When details of the family history emerge, Kwok “cracks open Sylvie’s heart, spilling its sorrowful contents.” Though this “beautifully written” book is rightly labeled a mystery, it “transcends the genre.”

The Gifted School

by Bruce Holsinger (Riverhead, $26)

Crystal Valley, Colo., is the kind of town that regularly appears on Best Places to Live lists, said Mackenzie Dawson in the New York Post. But when construction begins on a magnet school for the “profoundly gifted,” a mad scramble ensues among the fictional community’s liberal, well-to-do families. A neurologist scores inside knowledge to help her daughter. Another couple plan to fudge their child’s IQ score. And author Bruce Holsinger, a professor at the University of Virginia, has wicked fun exposing the hypocrisy of several other professed believers in meritocracy. The most privileged parents, of course, regard admission as their child’s birthright, said Nikki Shaner-Bradford in TheParisReview.org. Though Holsinger refrains from editorializing about any of the adults’ motives, each of their stumbles generates “a gleeful schadenfreude” while demonstrating “the ease with which morals are abandoned to protect one’s own.”

Waiting for Tom Hanks

by Kerry Winfrey (Berkley, $15)

“If you love romantic comedies,” said Michelle Darrisaw in O magazine, you should find Kerry Winfrey’s new novel “an ideal ode to the genre.” Annie Cassidy is a rom-com obsessive who lives in a small Ohio town and harbors two dreams: writing the screenplay that establishes her as the next Nora Ephron and meeting and marrying a Tom Hanks–like leading man. Those foolish aspirations start to seem almost attainable when a Hollywood film crew arrives to shoot in Annie’s neighborhood and she nabs a gig as a production assistant. “As required, she has a meet-cute encounter with the hunky star of the movie”—though she initially rejects the guy for reasons that feel “somewhat of a stretch,” said Maya Rodale in NPR.org. “Annie has the requisite sad backstory, quirky best friend, and gift for hysterical banter with everyone in her life,” but this book isn’t satisfied to just pair her up with a Prince Charming. Instead, “the lesson is that no one and nothing is perfect—and sometimes you have to be your own Tom Hanks.” ■